11.10.11

Lo prometido es deuda


Le prometí a Oyola que iba a traducir la reseña de Kryptonita al español, así que ahí va...

Qué pasaría si...?

Es de noche en la guardia del hospital Paroissien de Isidro Casanova, una parte fea del Gran Buenos Aires. Un nochero (los médicos "extraoficiales" que por unos pesos cubren las guardias de los médicos que se supone están de turno) está por terminar su tercer día sin dormir y no puede pensar en nada más que en ir a casa y tragar un puñado de pastillas que le den un sueño que es cualquier cosa menos lleno de paz. Fue una noche movida pero se está por poner peor: llega un paciente con una herida extraña y varios amigos extraños a la saga. Es Nafta Súper, uno de los criminales más peligrosos de la zona, y sus amigos son los demás miembros de su banda. Se vacía la guardioa de pacientes y médicos, la policía rodea al hospital, y el doctor recibe instrucciones claras:  mantené con vida a Nafta Súper hasta el amanecer o sos hombre muerto. Pero Nafta Súper no es un ser humano común... de hecho, ninguno de sus amigos lo es.
Los "elseworlds" son una afianzada tradición de los comics y las novelas gráficas, una que ubica a héroes conocidos en contextos alternativos (un Batman pirata de capa y espada, Súperman como Tarzán, Linterna Verde en el Lejano Oeste, etc.), y Kryptonita es un tributo declarado a los superhéroes a través de un elseworld muy argentino. Aquí, Nafta Súper es Súperman y sus "socios" son los miembros de la Liga de la Justicia (la Mujer Maravilla, Batman, Linterna Verde, etc.). Hay reconstrucciones de sus historias de vida, y hasta relatos de algunas de sus aventuras más famosas (como la serie de DC de la Muerte de Súperman de 1996), y la representación es precisa hasta con sus rivales y debilidades secretas. Esta es apenas una de las referencias pop de la novela, llena de alusiones al rock/pop de los 80, al a cumbia y a los códigos de la calle suburbana. Eso sólo la convertiría en una rareza en un mundillo literario que sabe más de filósofos franceses que de los pasillos de las villas miseria. Pero para Oyola (el autor de Chamamé, gólgota y Siete y el tigre harapiento, entre otros) es "lo de costumbre": se especializa en historias suburbanas vertiginosas en las que delito, acción y violencia se mezclan con fantasía y mafia, empapadas de un clima hecho de referencias al pop y rock y personajes fuertes con raíces muy profundas en la realidad. Se lo llamó un novelista negro, y ganó el primer premio en la Semana Negra de Gijón, pero su paleta (por más oscura que sea) tiene muchos otros matices.
Y Kryptonita es el ejemplo perfecto, un guiso en el que todos los ingredientes no pueden venir más que de su pluma. La historia es directa (Nafta Súper fue traicionado por su némesis, deben sobrevivir la noche peleando con la policía y demás), pero el hecho de que los personajes tengan "algo más" transforma a la historia en algo más. En el mismo acto, pone de cabeza aquel viejo dilema de la ficción policial argentina, que es negra por definición porque en estos pagos es difícil distinguir a los criminales, los jueces  y el gobierno (un problema sobre el que El secreto de sus ojos y Betibú, de Claudia piñeiro, hicieron foco, por mencionar sólo dos ejemplos recientes y bien conocidos): si esto sucede con los detectives locales, ¿qué le pasaría a un superhéroe argentino? Si sacamos al último hijo de Kryptón de Smallville, ¿va a crecer honrado y defensor de la ley? ¿O escribirá su propia ley? Éste descubrimiento solo, y traer estos temas a un ambiente literario que no tiene un Michael Chabon que ensalce sus héroes pop, hacen que valga la lena leer el libro.
Pero, por más vertiginosas y duras e imaginativas que sean las historias, hay momentos en los que el relato se suelta y se le va de las manos a Oyola, recargando una trama a la que le vendría bien ir derecho y rápido como una flecha con largos desvíos de flashbacks e historias pasadas de los personajes. Los desvíos en sí son atrapantes, el universo ficcional es sólido y las voces que usa para contarlo son interesantes para explorar, pero cuando varios capítulos de 10 páginas nos quitan de la trama principal en un libro de 215 páginas llega un punto en que el lector dice "está todo muy bueno, pero lleváme de vuelta al tipo que se está muriendo en la camilla del quirófano y a los bonaerenses armados hasta los dientes afuera del hospital."
Si el escritor es el padre de la novela, se podría decir que a veces Oyola es un padre permisivo al que le encanta ver las destrezas de su hijo habilidoso y se niega a tirar de las riendas o editar su producción, Y una imaginación desbocada contando una historia salvaje requiere de una mano firme para controlarla y darle forma, o la misma fuerza del potencial narrativo termina por ir en contra de la efectividad de la historia: si Tolkien dejó tantos cuadernos con historias laterales inconclusas de la Tierra Media y Sussannah Clarke extendió el universo de su Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell en algunos cuentos de The Ladies of Grace Adieu, es porque se dieron cuenta del potencial del mundo imaginario que habían creado pero también de que todas esas historias no cabían en el marco de las novelas (y esos eran libros mucho más extensos que Kryptonita).
Hay que decir, también, que ésta hubiera sido un área para que un buen editor se luciera afilando. Un editor que mereciera ese nombre hubiera ayudado a ajustar los hilos de la narración para que la prosa potente de Oyola y su explosiva imaginación rindieran al máximo, pero, ¡ay! , el trabajo de edición en este libro está al borde de la incompetencia, al punto de horrores de ortografía como "exploción" (página 175) llegaran a la página impresa. Por desgracia, una mirada superficial a otro lanzamiento de septiembre de la misma editorial muestra fallas similares, lo que no habla mal de los autores (los errores ocurren) pero sí del hecho de que alguien en esa editorial no se está ganando el sueldo (están ahí para que esos errores no lleguen a las librerías).
Pero ninguna de estas cosas anula el hecho de que es una novela notable, una que pide a gritos más parentela: si fuera la primera de su clase y se pudiera algún día llenar un estante con historias de calibre similar escritas por Oyola y otros escritores argentinos, yo como lector me daría por contento y la literatura argentina se vería muy enriquecida. No estamos frente a "The amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay" de Michael Chabon, ni tampoco a un "American Gods" de Neil Gaiman, pero es un buen primer paso en esa prometedora dirección.
Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 30 de septiembre de 2011

10.10.11

Entrevista con Scott Stoll, un ciclista que dio la vuelta al mundo en 4 años


Soul rider

By: Pablo Toledo
Scott Stoll on riding a bike around the world, writing about it and getting kids to illustrate it
What do you do when everything around you seems to crumble? Break down and cry? Roll downhill? Soldier on? Scott Stoll found an alternative: get on your bike and fall uphill.
Between Christmas and New Year, Scott was faced with a triple-whammy: he lost his job in an advertising agency, his girlfriend dumped him and his best friend eloped, leaving him without the little moral support he had left and half the rent for his apartment. But he seized the moment and took it as an opportunity to ask himself, for real, a question that we often fantasize about: if nothing was holding me back or tying me down, what would I do with my life? And the answer just flashed into his mind: I would ride a bicycle around the world.
A year later, in 1997, he rode his bike across the US to get trained. Four years (and a bad bike crash and serious knee surgery) after that, and only five days before two planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York, he and a friend were off on a journey that would take him four years to complete, across 41,444 kilometres (roughly the equivalent of the Earth’s circumference), 50 countries including Argentina and 6 continents. His bike took some serious pounding: 6 broken spokes, 9 welds, 2 snapped chains, 1 mangled derailleur, 2 broken seats, 1 snapped rear cog set, two broken racks and countless flats, some of which he fixed by just plugging the tyre full of mud and leaves. Needless to say, his body took an even bigger beating: he suffered from Facet syndrome (irritation of the joints), a dislocated wrist, a bruised tailbone, sprained knees, heat exhaustion, sunburn, hyper-extended elbows, saddle sores, nappy rash and many other ailments, including a broken heart somewhere in New Zealand.
Halfway down the journey his friend realized that going back home and “settling down” would be a greater adventure for him than completing the ride, but Scott made it to his endpoint in Cape Town and then back to San Francisco to write Falling Uphill, a book about his experience. Then he adapted the book for young adults and children, and got kids from the Poplar Creek Elementary School to do the illustrations. And now the US Embassy brought him back to Argentina (by plane, this time) to meet kids from primary schools across the country so they can talk to him and write the illustrations for the Spanish version of his memoir, due out in December.
The Herald caught up with Scott on a bike ride (where else?) organized by City Hall, which gives this scribe bragging rights for having ridden alongside the guy who rode around the world (I rode 30km on that day, somewhat short of Stoll’s achievement, but who’s counting?).
In the flesh, Stoll is one of the friendliest, most laid-back persons you can meet, like some close relative of Uncle Andy from Weeds. Two seconds into the conversation you realize that he could tell you all about the hardest climb and the longest ride and how to pedal your way through the Andes, up the Himalayas and across the Australian Outback, but that all those things are the bells and whistles of a journey across cultures and into the self that changed him forever.
“I was looking for something, some secret meaning, and I knew it had to be out there somewhere,” he says. He will return to this: “I realized that thing I was looking for, I had carried it with me all the way around the world,” and will talk about the multicultural awareness he earned along the way, about his new perspectives. And you can see that this is no bumper-sticker. If anything, it is a return to those lines by T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” It makes you wonder if the great Thomas Stearns ever rode a bike...
What was it like to ride out just as the Twin Towers were falling?
I only found out about 9/11 when I called my Mom and she was desperate. When I went to Mexico, all the US citizens were going home, so the Mexicans were very happy to see me, very sympathetic, and they were hurting because all the tourism was gone. I was the only person from the US biking around the world at the time. I know another English man who was doing it at the same time, and he told me he figured out that more people climbed Everest than do what we did.
What was the longest stretch between seeing someone and seeing someone again?
Not too long, because you’re on the road and you see people all the time. I would go months without speaking English – I’d like to think I learnt quite a bit of Spanish, but my problem was the different accents. Sometimes they weren’t even speaking Spanish: they were speaking Quechua and I was thinking ‘my Spanish is horrible’! Australia was very long days, a two-day ride between roadhouses (which is just a gas station and a restaurant). We rode through the atomic bomb testing range, I have a picture in the adult book of the graffitti with three-headed kangaroos.
Do people welcome you more when you are on a bike?
My friend and I always said that a bike is like an invitation, a ticket. US people don’t always get the warmest welcome, but because I was on a bike and I was doing it the hard way I was like a worker, a labourer, one of the people, and everyone really respected that. I was living like they were, sleeping in their places, eating their food, trying to talk their language, occasionally cutting down sugar canes or helping a guy fix a car at the side of the road. It was good, too, because nobody could steal my stuff, everyone knew me and they couldn’t ride my bicycle anyway! I got mugged once, but I didn’t have my bike then. I was in Guatemala. The police said it was ‘the popular thing to do’– I ran from the muggers and they said ‘you’re very lucky, it’s very popular to kill the person they’re robbing if they try to run away’.
What was the landing like when you came back?
I don’t even know where to start, it took me many years to get over from the culture shock. Basically, you could say there was nowhere left to run, you know? I came home and I could see myself like in a mirror, my own culture, and I could see how I was programmed by my culture to see the world a certain way. I realized that the world wasn’t the way your culture programmes it, but also me, my person, my values, my morals, who I thought I was, what I wanted to do... I realized I could be anybody I wanted to be finally, after all those years. It sank in when I went home that this was my life.
So that thing you were looking for when you started the journey, you found it...
Ironically, I found it only by coming home and realizing I had brought it with me all around the world and I wasn’t seeing it! There’s a difference between somebody telling you something and when you do it. I finally understand now that everyday life is your destination. The bicycle is the ultimate metaphor for life. Your dream is like a mountain, and to some people that mountain is so big it looks like a wall – you can’t see the top, you can’t see a way around it. Have faith: eventually, you will reach the top and you’ll have a view that you’ve never had before. And the good and the bad news is there’s another mountain on top of that one. There’s always something; you live one dream, you get another.
Did you write Falling Uphill right after you returned?
I wrote the majority of the book while I was travelling. When I came back I had some offers to publish it and I turned them down, and it wasn’t for another four years that I wrote the last two final chapters. It took me that long to feel comfortable, to put my truth into perspective. It was the difference between standing at the bottom of a hill and then standing at the top looking down and seeing your winding little path all the way to the top.
Would you do it again?
Probably not: I would be a little lonely, my knees would object... probably if I met a woman and she said ‘we have to do this’. If I did it again I would go slower: even riding a bicycle you can go pretty fast, and I think it could take you 8 to 12 years to see the world – probably your whole life! My adventure right now is working with the Embassy and Argentine schools making this book. To me that’s the best thing ever, to take what I learned and give all these people something I wish I’d had when I was a little kid. I didn’t have this understanding or this faith, I didn’t think I could do any of this. If I could just reach a few kids and leave them with this sense that they can do whatever they want to do, then my job is done.
When did you know you were actually going to finish?
Something happened in India, I can’t really say. I met a guru and talked to her and meditated. I was afraid she was gonna tell me ‘you’re gonna have to stay here and chant songs for the rest of your life’... but when I met her I told her what I was doing, about how to me life is about riding up a mountain: you ride to the top and all of a sudden you go ‘swoosh!’ and you relax and you can hear the birds sing, to me that’s what life is about. And she says ‘I couldn’t give you a better answer! Keep going!’ Somewhere around there I started to realize that maybe I hadn’t finished but I’d already arrived. I knew I could do it, and my only question was ‘Do I still want to?’ My friend Dennis started the ride with me and went home after 15 months, he said ‘It’s not worth it, I can have more of an adventure by going home.’ But you get half-way, you’ve gotta go the other half no matter what!
Is Dennis still a friend?
He’s still a friend, I told him I was coming to Argentina and his first question was if I was going to visit Ramiro, in the Chaco, the guy who rescued us from the mud. We were stuck in the mud, moving less than 5 kilometres in one day just pushing our bikes, and he showed up and put our bikes in his truck and then we spent another 12 hours pushing his car home. He said ‘You must think it’s easier to ride a bicycle than drive a truck!’ It was so muddy we had to get out every half an hour and shovel mud and push the truck and get back and slide off the road, we did that for at least 12 hours until we got to his house and he treated us to his son’s bed and all of this food. We met everyone in the community, we stayed for about 5 days until the roads dried and we could ride our bikes again, talked to the schools... it was one of my best moments. Up until that moment we had ridden our bicycles from the US down to Argentina and we would wake up every day and see how far we could get. We were literally struggling to survive, we didn’t know what we were gonna eat and where we were gonna sleep and we didn’t have enough water. But it wasn’t until things went so absolutely wrong that we couldn’t ride or even walk, that we were forced to stop and look around and live with the people and those people happened to be Argentines.
What is riding for six hours a day almost every day for 4 years like?
It boils your emotional baggage to the surface, your challenges in life. I had a lot of time to think and meditate. For me, my trip was not so much about the bicycle but more about how you ride the bike, how you manage life, what life is about – I would think all day about that. That was the good thing about going fast: I knew that if I went slow I would stop and meet somebody and never want to keep going, but I went fast and got my quick perspective of everything. I saw politics, culture, disease, poverty, starvation, the most beautiful and the ugliest and everything in between, and it really gave me my foundation for life and who I am. In the US we live too privileged a lifestyle sometimes, and I didn’t understand that. I saw people die, people who couldn’t afford to live and were still happy and that was a mystery to me, how could those people be so happy when in the US often people are just angry and upset? They need to spend a day when they have to find their own food and water and then they’ll sing a different song!
More information
You can read more about Scott Stoll’s journey at www.theargonauts.com.
Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 27 de septiembre de 2011

Mi reseña de Betibú, de Claudia Piñeiro


Claudia Piñeiro returns to the scene of the crime

Claudia Piñeiro has established herself as one of the key names in Argentine literature, as far as readers are concerned, riding on a series of fortunate events: the runaway hit of Las viudas de los jueves (Clarín Novel Award 2005, international bestseller, adapted into a blockbuster film) followed by a successful reissue of her previous thriller Tuya, and then the critically acclaimed Elena sabe and the awarded Las grietas de Jara. Now the hat trick is complete with another bestseller, Betibú.
This first paragraph begs for the followup “a writer struck on a formula for bestsellers and is riding it big time,” if it weren’t for the fact that it is actually difficult to find that many similarities between the books. Las viudas de los jueves struck gold with its detective story set in the secret spaces of a gated community (with plot sometimes yielding to the portrayal of the infamous life of the rich and secluded, a major part of the book’s appeal), but Elena sabe was more about disease than crime and Las grietas de Jara was more about the growing pains of its middle-aged protagonist than the suspense of its enigmas. She does perform clever variations of the crime fiction pattern, with shades of noir even, and she develops in all these books an evolving craft for fleshing out interesting characters and weaving plots full of twists and turns in all the right places, but that is where similarities end, and in all other respects her writing is uncompromising – say what you want about it, but it is neither copycat nor written to please. And yet, readers can’t get enough of her. In Argentine literature, this is as rare as a unicorn playing jazz guitar. In a tutu. On the moon.
Betibú is rare, also, because Piñeiro makes her career and reputation a centerpiece in the story through Nurit Iscar (a strange name indeed, and an anagram for “satiric run”, but if there is a meaning behind it Piñeiro is yet to reveal it), “the queen of detective fiction,” a washed-out crime novelist who stopped writing after a catastrophic attempt at a romantic tale and a scathing review it got in El Tribuno, the country’s leading newspaper. The setting of the story, which begins with an apparent suicide in a country club (the husband of a woman who had been murdered on the same house, a not-at-all-veiled allusion to the García Belsunce case) and takes place mostly within its well-guarded boundaries, also looks back on Las viudas de los jueves, but reverts the perspective: this time, the outsiders are looking in and treading foreign ground as workers or temporary guests which are not used to the Kafkaesque security routines, feel baffled by the mechanics of the lifestyle and cannot fully grasp the web of prejudice and perverseness behind it all.
The plot revolves around those deaths and the dark secrets behind them, but also about El Tribuno and the role of the press. An old-school crime journalist, Jaime Brena, has been demoted to writing absurd stories on “general interest” trivia, and his role is now filled by an unnamed youngblood who knows everything about Google and nothing about police sources and digging up stories beyond the official version. When the suicide makes headlines, Brena watches from the sidelines as the kid botches the coverage of a case he had first investigated. Nurit is then called by the newspaper’s sinister editor (and her former lover) to set up shop at a loaned house inside the country club and write a daily feature on the case, as a crime novelist. Power games will unfold, along with discussions on leather-sole vs. online journalism, how information gets thwarted and slanted, what interests get in the way of its dissemination and how crime stories transmogrify in a country where corruption rules and there are essentially no clean guys.
At first sight, one feels tempted to think that Piñeiro is not a stylist – her prose does not offer those gleaming passages that leave you in awe. But then you realize that her writing just flows, and that you have devoured the 345 pages (generous type, spacing and margins lend a helping hand here) in a couple of days. This happens only when a story grabs you by the neck and is delivered in a language that works for the tale rather than for its own sake, and is the mark of an author confident enough to rely more on the mechanics of storytelling than the fireworks of verbal flare.
But it is not all narrative muscle here: the story has a heart as big as a house, and is filled with humour – some of it wry, much of it at the expense of Piñeiro and the literary scene (including a delightful jab at a particularly dimwitted so-called book reviewer). It is clear that the writer is exorcizing some of her own demons in the figure of Nurit Iscar and several other features of the book, but she pulls it off without putting herself on the spot or being self-condescending and never lets herself get in the way of her novel – another jazz-playing unicorn in a literary scene so utterly dominated by mountain-sized egos. The book does slacken in some chapters burdened with too much exposition (although there is much effort put on making that exposition integral to the plot) and the retelling of a hazy marihuana night is not that satisfactory, but it is a solid read regardless.
Claudia Piñeiro’s writing career, which actually started in the early 90s when she was a young and dissatisfied corporate accountant, gained momentum a decade later in her mid-40s, and the results speak for themselves. If attention has been put in recent years on young writers and some biographical gimmicks (He works on TV and discovered spirituality! She was an anorexic!), her meteoric rise reminds us that, deep down, it’s all about the story and how well you tell it, and that certain qualities in writers must be allowed to blossom if the writing is to stand on its own merits.
Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 16 de septiembre de 2011

Mi reseña de Kryptonita, de Leonardo Oyola


What if...?

Kryptonita, by Leonardo Oyola. Random House Mondadori.

It’s night in the emergency room of the Paroissien hospital in Isidro Casanova, a nasty BA suburb. A nochero (the “unofficial” doctors who for a price cover the shifts of the professionals who are supposed to be on duty) is about to end his third day on his feet and can think of nothing but going home and swallowing a handful of pills to get him into a sleep that is anything but peaceful. It has been an eventful night, but it is about to get worse: a patient comes in with a strange wound on his back and several dangerous friends in tow. It is Nafta Súper, one of the most dangerous thugs in the area, and his friends are the other members of his gang. The ER is cleared of patients and doctors, the police surrounds the hospital, and the doctor is given clear instructions: keep Nafta Súper alive until daybreak, or you’re dead. But Nafta Súper is no ordinary human... in fact, neither of his friends is.
“Elseworlds” are a well-established tradition in comics and graphic novels, one which sets known heroes in alternative settings (a swashbuckling pirate Batman, Superman as Tarzan, Green Lantern in the Far West, etc.), and Leonardo Oyola’s Kryptonita is an open tribute to superheroes through a very Argentine elseworld. Here, Nafta Súper is Superman and his ‘associates’ are members of the League of Justice (Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, etc.). There are reconstructions of their backstories, and even retellings of some of their most famous adventures (like the 1992 Death of Superman DC series), and the representation is true even for their rivalries and secret weaknesses.
This is but one of the pop references in the novel, full of allusions to 1980s rock/pop and cumbia and suburban street codes. For that alone, this would be a rarity in a literary world that has more knowledge of French philosophers than the inside of a villa miseria. But, for Oyola (the author of Chamamé, Gólgota and Siete y el tigre harapiento, among others) you could call it par for the course: he specializes in fast-paced suburban stories where crime, action and violence meet fantasy and magic, steeped in an atmosphere of pop and rock references and strong characters with very deep roots in the real world. He has been called a noir novelist, and has in fact won the top prize at Gijón’s Semana Negra in Spain, but his palette (albeit dark) has many more shades than that.
And Kryptonita is the perfect example, a stew where all the ingredients could only come from his pen. The story is straightforward (Nafta Súper has been betrayed by his nemesis, they must get through the night fighting the police and so on), but the fact that there is “something else” to these characters turns it into something else. By the same token, he is turning the tables on the old dilemma of Argentine crime fiction, which is by definition noir because down here cops, criminals, judges and Government are hard to tell from one another (as in El secreto de sus ojos or Claudia Piñeiro’s Betibú, to name but two recent popular examples that put this conundrum up front and centre): if this is what happens with local detectives, what would happen to an Argentine superhero? If you take Krypton’s last son out of Smallville, will he grow righteous and uphold the law? Or will he make his own? For this discovery alone, and for bringing this into a literary arena that has no Michael Chabons to embrace its pop heroes, this is a book worth reading.
But, fast-paced and hardhitting and inventive as the stories are, there are moments when the tale breaks loose and flies away from Oyola’s hands, burdening a plotline that would benefit from being straight and fast as an arrow with lengthy detours into flashbacks and backstory. The detours themselves are gripping, the fictional universe is solid and the voices he uses to tell them are worth exploring, but when several 10-page chapters take you away from the main plot in a 215-page novel there comes a point when the reader says “this is good stuff, but take us back to the dying man on the surgery table and the bonaerense cops armed to the teeth outside.”
If the writer is the father of the novel, you could say that at times Oyola is an over-indulgent dad who cannot get enough of his talented kid and refuses to rein them in or edit the output. And a wild imagination telling a wild tale needs a steady hand to control it and bring it into shape, or the force of the narrative potential ends up working against the effectiveness of the story itself: if Tolkien left so many notebooks with unfinished side stories of the Middle Earth and Susannah Clarke featured the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel in some short stories of The Ladies of Grace Adieu, it was because they could see the potential of the imaginary world they had created but were also aware that all those stories did not fit in the framework of the novels (and those were much lengthier books than Kryptonita).
It must be said, too, that this would have been an area for a good editor to finetune. A proper editor would have helped tighten the narrative strings for Oyola’s powerful prose and explosive imagination to come to its fullest, but, alas, the editing work on this edition is borderline shoddy, to the point of spelling howlers such as “exploción” (page 175) making it to the printed page. Unfortunately, a cursory glance at another September release from the same publisher shows similar flaws, which do not speak of the writer (errors happen) but do speak to the fact that someone in that publishing house is asleep at the wheel (they are there to stop the errors from making it into bookstores).
But none of this takes away from the fact that this is a remarkable book, one that cries for relatives: if this were the first of its kind and we could one day fill a shelf with likeminded stories by Oyola and other Argentine writers, I for one would call myself a happy reader and Argentine literature would be much the richer. This is not Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay yet, not quite Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but it’s a very good first step in that most promising direction.
Publicada en el Buenos Aires Herald el 30 de septiembre de 2011

3.7.11

To e- or not to e-

Two UK experts on digital publishing talk about the present and future of ebooks


You and I both know that the days of the newspaper, as in the loose bundle of sheets you're holding in your hands right now, are counted. In fact you may already be reading this on your computer screen. And most people do not lose too much sleep over that fact (unless you happen to work in a newsroom...). And yet, when the shadow of extinction hovers over books matters get a lot more thorny. And yet, things like Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad, or even smartphones and netbooks, are being heralded by some as “book killers.” The latest fad? A new world? Countdown for our beloved codex?
Peter Collingridge and George Walkley are certainly two of the right people to ask. Collingridge is currently at the helm of Enhanced Editions, a publisher specializing in digital projects for the iPhone and iPad that augment the reading experience: at the push of a finger, the text on the screen (and it could be Charles Dickens, or Nick Cave, or Philip Pullman, or even Stephen King) may be accompanied by the voice of the author reading the book, or a soundtrack, or a short video that complements a scene. Walkley is responsible for the digital division of the Hachette UK group. An entrepreneur on the cutting edge of reinventing the reading experience and the captain of a fleet of 40,000 titles on the treacherous seas of digital, two different approaches and the same passion for books. And, just to ease your angst, yes, they had their iPhones and Macbooks on the table as we spoke, but also a couple old-fashioned hardcovers.

What attitudes towards digital publishing did you find among local publishers?
Peter Collingridge: What's interesting is the interest more than what we've seen. There's very much a sense from publishers and public that this is coming, but it's like an early warning – even in Britain, electronic reading is a very small percentage of the market compared to what it is in the US.
George Walkley: This Book Fair reminded me of the London Book Fair a year ago. The conversations were on the whole about six months behind where we are in Britain. We've also met some people who are doing more advanced things, so the market is here but not evenly distributed yet.
PC: There's also a sense that's what's happening will certainly affect Argentina but will also have a wider impact on Latin America and Spanish-language publishing as well. An extremely literate country such as Argentina is going to have its own rate of adoption, but how that affects the Spanish language industry is gonna be huge.

Being six months ahead of our learning curve, what's coming here next?
GW: We were having these same conversations until last August, when the Kindle was officially launched in the UK and they began marketing it. By the first week of December it was very difficult to go anywhere without seeing adverts for the Kindle – and I remember coming home after Christmas and every train I rode, every public place I visited was full of Kindles, it suddenly seemed to have exploded and there was this mass market moment.
PC: That, and also the announcement and launch of the iPad. A lot of their marketing was visualizing people reading. Apple and Amazon's aggressive marketing was the tipping point in reading: it became mainstream. I was in Italy, Russia and Spain in the last six months, and without a Kindle it is definitely slower to adopt because the iPad is a general entertainment device whereas the Kindle does one thing very well. The Kindle is driving 60 or 70 percent of electronic reading.

And yet your company is betting on a much more sophisticated reading experience than what the Kindle offers.
PC: We are pretty pragmatic about that. We invested in apps, but we've also done projects which are purely for Kindle, and what we're very interested in is understanding the new reader and what this new reader likes, whether they want audio and video or just very beautiful text or nothing at all, but also exploring how ebooks are sold, recommended, discussed, shared, the whole ecosystem.

How does a mass market publisher like Hachette deal with these two different devices?
GW: There are two layers here: the product level and the platform level. On the product level, 99 percent of what we sell in both the US and UK are very straightforward e-books, a replication of the print book with very few enhancements. That's what consumers are buying in large quantities, and so our immediate focus has been on getting a very broad range of those available. Having said that, we do expect consumers' taste to change over time, and this is where we came up with a platform: we started off with simple platforms that did one thing, but increasingly now there are also extras on the side like social features, being able to recommend a quote from the book on Facebook, and we see those becoming more important. The majority of e-readers now have a network connection, can connect to social networks and do all of those interesting things. In time, I think, the sort of work Peter's company does will become much more normal and will be seen as the rule rather than the exception. We've done projects like that and will continue to experiment, but also as a very commercial house we keep an eye on where the mass market is, where we can get sales in the short to medium term while we plan innovation for the medium to long term. Five years from now multimedia will be much more accepted and people won't see it as much of an interruption. In the past we've seen really good multimedia alongside the text and sometimes that was seen as an interruption and something readers did not want it. But we're moving to a world of richer, across-platform experiences: I've seen research on how teenagers and young people consume television, and the interesting thing is that they check social networks while they're watching. That's a change that happened to TV over a 10-year period, and over time I think people will read and use social media while they read.

This seems like a high-speed replica of the natural process of reading a book and talking it over with friends, a reading circle, etc... Is this speeding up creating something new?
PC: Everybody does things at their own pace – I'm currently reading about 7 or 8 books at different speeds, some of which I'll finish, some of which I won't. I just signed up to a private feature of a new social reading service which allows me to share that reading with my friends – that's built on platforms rather than products. The sort of stuff that we're doing and the social things are currently very much on the outer edges and the innovating end of publishing, but companies like Apple, Amazon and Google do innovating stuff very very quickly and with it reach millions and millions of people.

I was thinking of the difference between the Alice in Wonderland app on the iPad and the enhanced editions you do: Alice feels like a game with text more than a book.
PC: It's a wonderful game, but if you've ever given it to a child they play the game and don't read the book. With us, what we want to do is to not distract the reading experience but take people deeper into it. Having the author read the book to you in their own voice, in the case of the Nick Cave book having a soundtrack, all of that stuff is meant not to add bells and whistles onto a work of art but to take you deeper into the work. At a time where consumers' attention is under assault from so many different media at the same time, reading (which has always been seen as a luxury pursuit) will manifest itself in interesting ways.

Working for a mass publisher, how do you sell the notion that we've published this book in print, it's sold well, but now we have to do all this other work for the electronic edition?
GW: Editors and publishers are pragmatic people, they see that there's a new market and they want their books and their authors to be part of that market. Taking our existing list and making it available for e-readers is straightforward: it's an issue of volume and engineering but it's not fundamentally difficult. With the more enhanced material, we take a very selective view. We have about 40,000 titles in our care, of which so far 6,000 are available as straightforward e-books and in time that will rise to 20,000. We're doing several thousand standard e-books a year, while we might do a dozen enhanced projects in that period. We pre-select the projects carefully, only those where the author and the editor will be supportive, and it's generally an easy sell because they're keen by definition.
PC: We don't see what goes on behind the scenes, but people who contact us tend to be editors and publishers. In the past it was marketing directors, but now there's an enthusiasm for digital coming from the editorial department and that's a very welcome change because those who are responsible for the creative direction of the book will also be safeguarding its transition to digital.
GW: The publishing business is fundamentally one of relationships – our relationship with the reader, our relationship with Amazon or Apple, but mostly about our relationship to the author, and in most cases that relationship is embodied by the editor. A publisher recently told me he's currently employing more editors now than at any time in his company's history. This is a challenge for the industry and it's changing many things about the way we conceive the book and the way we're distributing the book itself, but very fundamentally it's a huge opportunity to do very interesting things with books, to take them to wider audiences.

How about an author like Henry James? Would you do an enhanced version of that?
PC: I wouldn't do that with Henry James. There are some enhanced ebooks which depend heavily on dramatizations: unless you are Ang Lee and you have his budget and production, it's just gonna be crap and really awkward. But there are interventions that could be made along the lines of a slightly more modern version of the introductions to the classic texts where the publisher curates a set of supporting material which goes into the contents of the book: the text, a version of The Turn of the Screw film with Nicole Kidman, the review of the time, social reading groups, a sort of optional multimedia annotation with things like “if you like this book you may like this other book by Guy de Maupassant” and introduce the first chapter of the book, things a bit more crazy than when you're limited by the number of pages you can print. Yet, a lightness of touch in enhancement is very important. Enhancement and distraction are two different things. One of the different challenges as an industry is how to sustain the interest of a new generation of readers courted by very appealing media.
GW: We're very used to the idea of our competitors being Random House or Harper Collins or Penguin: it's a change in mindset to think that our competitors are Angry Birds and Twitter and YouTube and email.

Are you jumping on Angry Bird land when you jump on the device?
PC: Yes, but we capture data from the use of our applications and we know that readers prefer audio to video – video in e-books is not very interesting to them, but the author reading to them is by far the most popular feature we have. The average time that any user spends in an app is about 30 seconds. In our applications on the iPad it is 30 minutes, but on the iPhone it's over an hour and 10 minutes. That demonstrates two things. Firstly, that people still like to read for relatively significant increments of time. But also, that they are distracted more on the iPad – more things to do, whereas on the iPhone you're much more conscious of having to switch between things. When you're on the iPad you're always thinking “what shall I do next?”.
GW: There's also this thing that my iPhone literally never leaves my side, but I don't always have my iPad with me. The iPhone is a very pleasant companion, so it's quite easy to spend a lot of time with it.
PC: The genesis of our company came from having an iPhone and finding that I was using it to read in the moments when I didn't have a book with me but I had nothing else to do – on the bus, the tube, the bank.

It's easy to get tangled on the bells and whistles: what do you want the apps to feel like?
PC: We don't want to reproduce the book in a kitsch: iBook on iPad is a kitsch, with side pages and the flipping gesture to turn pages. We rejected that, but we kept on to the better principles of the book: very elegant typography, and that the design should be invisible – as soon as you notice the interface is there, you've failed. User feedback is that they like flipping pages, but other feedback says that flipping pages is very tiresome because the screen size on a phone is little more than a paragraph.

Do you think there will be a moment where authors start thinking in terms of digital media from the beginning?
GW: Yes. There are electronic publishers who are thinking in bold ways, people in the academic sector who think about interactive narrative and have done a lot of work on this. It is primarily about the book and the text now, but I see the line being blurred between forms of media. Movie and TV companies have done transmedia stuff for shows like Heroes, Lost and Doctor Who: fantastic interactive narratives. But this is not going to come mostly from publishers. We are working with fantastically talented people who come up with lots of things, and what we help do is add value, help them deliver it, bring resources and scale, and to be blunt finance them. But we're not fundamentally the creative originators.

Amazon was at first a book company, but Apple and Google were never it. How do these players change the game?
GW: I'm a card-carrying Amazon fan in terms of the consumer experience, they do retail like no one else. They started in books, whereas Google and Amazon are newer players in the book world but they've dealt with other media so they're not completely unfamiliar with it. It's exciting to look at the pure start-ups who are coming in without any baggage of preconceived wisdom – from the mobile phone world, from games.

How about having only one distributor, in the case of the Apple store? Has it ever been a problem?
PC: Apple is very exacting technically and in terms of content about what goes on the store. We've had some hairy moments... Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro is about sex and drugs and rock'n'roll – it took them three weeks to approve the iPhone app, but it felt like six months, we were very worried that it was going to get rejected. It was our first app, we tried to coincide the launch with a tour Nick Cave was doing at the same time, that was tough. Somebody who works in publishing in the US described it as farming on the side of a volcano, it's very fertile when you're there but something could happen: if they decide they're gonna do books now and all other books are out of the Apple Stores, for instance. It's the deal, we signed up the terms and conditions... One of the new complications of selling apps is that suddenly content which had never had any kind of level censorship at all was arbitrarily being assigned age ratings through a series of 12 questions and the answers were way too important.

Imagine you wake up 10 years from now and you want to access some content that today we associate with a book. What do you see?
GW: More. More of everything. First of all, more books: in the US market, the number of books published has increased tenfold over an 8-year period, and the majority of the new books published have been self-published. There have been over a million new books published in the US last year, and the tendency is more books. There will of course be more formats, and I don't think there will be a hard and fast right format for a book, it will depend on the book in question, on its intended audience and its intended purpose. We will have a scale: on one end we will have multimedia experiences that may not look very much like a book, and at the other end we will have very traditional forms. Between the two there will be a range of things, we'll certainly see digital disproportionately replace paperbacks, mass-market books, airport books, books which are read once and tend not to be read again. We'll also see things like print on demand, straightforward e-books, enhanced e-books, and then multimedia. We'll also see more business models: straightforward sale, lending and renting, Spotify-like subscription models, bundles where I order a book online and while it is shipped I have access to a digital edition.
PC: I see Blade Runner. I see backstreet illegal dens of iniquity where you can get hardback printed books and collectors seen as perverts (laughs). I think we will see a cherishing of print and the tactile: I buy all my music on vynil, even though I have a Spotify account.
GW: There's a William Gibson line that I adore, “The future's here, it's just not evenly distributed”.
PC: Quite right. There is something Gibsonian in the idea of the bookshop selling rare, scarce items.

Every time you talk digital you also talk MP3 and piracy. What's your take on that?
GW: We see a lot of filesharing by consumers. As an industry, we have the luxury of looking at sister industries like music and film and learn lessons from them. I'm pleased to say we haven't gone down the route of litigating against individual consumers, which I'm not convinced is a sensible approach. There are two things I am absolutely certain of: the first is that there is absolutely no way of eradicating piracy and filesharing, and the second is that the most effective way we can reduce piracy is by providing a high-quality, convenient, easy to buy product. The fact is I can get my computer and get any book in the New York Times Top 10 in about five or ten minutes through a variety of websites – it may be a good quality file, it may be a bad quality file that's been badly scanned and even rekeyed, I have no guarantee of quality. If, on the other hand, I can go on my Kindle and 30 seconds later I can have a really good quality ebook...
PC: But in contrast, if you go to Amazon and you try to find those Top 10 books as a Kindle or iPad edition you might not find them.
GW: The industry has to make sure that those books are available legitimately. It's very interesting that the Harry Potter books still aren't available as legitimate e-books but it's a trivially easy exercise to get all of them. Frustrated availability and frustrated consumers is a big driver of filesharing. The onus is on publishers to get the e-books available, make sure that the quality is great (something that publishers have struggled with but we're getting better at), and make sure that the price is reasonable. In the UK we typically set the price of the e-book at about half the price of the book, so the consumer feels that it is treated like a book and they feel it's a reasonable amount to pay. I think asking, regardless of the actual cost structure of e-books, there's an expectation from the consumer of e-books to be cheaper than physical editions, and we have to understand that.
PC: If your books aren't available, you're missing out on a potential sale. If somebody really wants that book for their new iPad and they're not gonna buy a print edition, we're training them on how to pirate stuff so that the next time it becomes easier and easier. They wouldn't normally do that, but until there's an alternative they probably will – I've pirated stuff because it wasn't available. I went to Russia, and they're absolutely terrified of piracy, but the industry's really bad about making their product available to the point where they've cataclysmically destroyed their chances of being able to emerge from the position they're in. They've got a massively fragmented market, everybody knows where to get books illegally, and as a result the chances of popping the genie back in the bottle are very small. That's because they've been late at going digital and they failed to meet the demand of the consumers.
GW: It's very important that publishers don't succumb to the conceit that consumers are in love with the delivery format or the business model: they're in love with the experience of reading and the emotions and the knowledge they take from it, not with the collection of paper and glue.
PC: The people that are buying Kindles are not the early adopters, they are the ones who bought stacks of print books before.
Publicado en el Buenos Aires Herald el 2/7/2011

22.4.11

¿Las palabras discriminan?

Publiqué esta nota en la revista Newsweek en 2009, a partir de una campaña de difusión del INADI que tenía frases como "Son todos negros" y abajo el slogan "Las palabras discriminan". Ahora que está en cierto candelero el tema de la agresión/discriminación verbal, los contextos y las respuestas, aquí va de nuevo la nota. Debajo, el desgrabado con las declaraciones de la entonces titular del INADI y una lingüista que quedaron fuera de la nota por cuestiones de espacio.


El 14 de agosto el Inadi lanzó la campaña de prevención “Las palabras discriminan, no discrimines”. La campaña se desarrollará a lo largo de dos meses con carteles en transporte y vía pública, además de talleres en escuelas de todo el país y un trabajo conjunto con el Foro de la Discriminación en los Medios que culminará con la confección de manuales de estilo para periodistas para un tratamiento no discriminatorio de grupos vulnerabilizados.
¿Pero hasta qué punto es correcto afirmar que las palabras discriminan? ¿La discriminación se halla en ciertas expresiones, o éstas son emergentes de ideas que en cualquier otra formulación pueden ser igual de agresivas?
María José Lubertino, titular del INADI, limita el alcance de la consigna: “Las palabras no discriminan, las personas discriminan. Técnicamente no es correcto porque la frase en sí misma no priva de un derecho. Pero las palabras tienen poder en la construcción de imaginarios y de prácticas, no son neutras. Estas palabras construyen o reproducen en el lenguaje cotidiano los estereotipos que después degeneran en situaciones de violencia o de actos discriminatorios concretos. Algo puede ser dicho por error o ignorancia en algunos contextos, pero hay frases que no dan lugar a pensar que su utilización no sea descalificante y prejuiciosa.”
Para María del Carmen Grillo, docente investigadora de la Universidad Austral, licenciada en Letras y doctora en Comunicación, “todos coincidimos con que eso está mal, son términos despectivos y peyorativos, pero hay enclaves menos advertidos y más naturalizados que están tramitando prejuicios en otro nivel. Lo que habría que analizar son los presupuestos y los implícitos, no de palabras sueltas, sino de palabras puestas en encadenamientos. Estalla la Embajada de Israel y se habla de ‘víctimas inocentes’: la oposición y la diferencia están implícitos, porque si hay inocentes hay culpables, y eso me parece más temible”.
¿Viviríamos en un mundo mejor si elimináramos ciertas palabras? “Si se eliminan los términos está más limpito todo, pero algo se va a poner en ese lugar,” dice Grillo. Steven Pinker, el autor de “El instinto del lenguaje”, llama “la rueda del eufemismo” al proceso por el que los eufemismos absorben las connotaciones de las palabras que reemplazaban: “mover el vientre” e “ir de cuerpo” resultan hoy tan revulsivas como dentro de unos años lo será nuestro “tránsito lento”. La manía estadounidense de generar eufemismos no parece haber evitado que en estas elecciones muchos votantes rechacen visceralmente a un candidato negro (perdón, afroamericano).
Pero, como señala Lubertino, “en muchos casos es imprescindible el reemplazo de un término por otro cuando los colectivos han manifestado que no les da lo mismo”. La evolución de “sidoso” a “portador de SIDA” a “persona que vive con VIH” no es un mero reemplazo de términos sino un reconocimiento a la sensibilidad del grupo y a su propia elaboración teórica, al igual que el uso de “pueblos originarios” en lugar de “aborígenes” o “indios”. 


Lubertino
Nosotros trabajamos con denuncias y atendemos a las víctimas cuando hay una situación concreta con una persona que comete un acto discriminatorio identificado y que implica un cercenamiento de un derecho o la exclusión de un bien o un servicio para la persona que en base al estereotipo es excluida. Recibimos permanentemente llamadas y denuncias por situaciones que no tienen entidad de acto discriminatorio, porque no implican la privación de un derecho, pero sí un hostigamiento, maltrato sistemático en lugar de trabajo, en escuelas o situaciones de vida cotidiana y de calle.
Tomamos frases estereotipantes e injuriantes para grupos colectivos vulnerabilizados o discriminados por género, diversidad sexual, nacionalidad, color de piel, aspecto físico, obesidad, y lo planteamos con las frases más repetidas en nuestro sondeo, que tienen que ver con estereotipos y lo que hacen es transmitir prejuicios que en algunos contextos son insultos discriminatorios y que en otros contextos refuerzan la reproducción de estereotipos y prejuicios que desembocan muchas veces en actos discriminatorios que afectan derechos de las personas.
Una campaña muy agresiva.
Una manera de expresar que esas palabras generan y reproducen estereotipos. Las palabras no discriminan, las personas discriminan. Técnicamente no es correcto decir que las palabras discriminan porque la frase en sí misma no priva de un derecho – es una abstracción, una licencia literaria decirlo de esta manera.
Las palabras son violentas: la violencia verbal que cargan estas palabras genera una clasificación, una tipología de las personas, una jerarquía. Las personas somos todas diferentes. El Inadi promueve una cultura de la diversidad: lo que hace esta clasificación de las personas en función de alguna de sus características utilizadas de esta manera es establecer jerarquías sociales.
Talleres en las escuelas de todo el país. Foro de la Discriminación en los Medios con periodistas armando manuales de estilo para un tratamiento no discriminatorio de los grupos vulnerabilizados.
La jurisprudencia del Inadi era que los insultos no generaban un acto discriminatorio. Nosotros entendimos que hay situaciones en las que los insultos pueden ser discriminatorios porque se daba a partir de un insulto la privación de un derecho. Hay otras circunstancias en las que no, hay que ver la situación y el contexto – las palabras no pueden ser tomadas fuera de su contexto.
El otro día discutimos con Andy Kusnetzoff porque alguien puede decir “le compré al boliviano de la esquina”. Yo a veces discuto con la gente de los periódicos cuando ponen “trabajo en negro”, y yo les digo que la gente del foro de afrodescendientes discute, no está de acuerdo, se ofende cuando se pone esa frase. Después cuando dicen “Tres peruanos robaron”, las tapas de Crónica manifiestan la estereotipia, en otros casos la discusión con algunos periodistas y editores de policiales es que “estamos describiendo la situación, tenemos que dar la información”. En el uso del lenguaje el valor prioritario a tener en cuenta es la libertad de expresión, ahora, hay una restricción a la libertad de expresión que son las injurias y las calumnias y por otro lado el discurso de odio (hate speech) y las palabras de lucha (fighting words), una jurisprudencia de la Corte Suprema de los Estados Unidos que a veces ha sido tomada en la Argentina. La libertad de expresión no ampara el discurso de odio. Cualquiera puede odiar y no le podemos impedir que lo exprese, pero el discurso de odio que restringe la libertad de expresión es cuando efectivamente el grupo o la persona a la que ese discurso de odio se refiere puede tener un temor razonable a que esto se convierta en realidad. Cuando alguien dice “odio a los gallegos” en Argentina, por supuesto que es estereotipante, pero nadie puede pensar razonablemente que pueda correr riesgo su vida o que va a ser discriminado por ser gallego. Pero si alguien dijera “odio a los indígenas” sí tendríamos que prestar otro tipo de atención porque efectivamente e un grupo que está vulnerabilizado en sus derechos, no se cumplen sus derechos, hay datos concretos. Si alguien dice “odio a los católicos” no pasa lo mismo que si dice “odio a los judíos”. Esto lo tratamos de fijar en el dictamen de D’Elía: el Estado repudia todo discurso de odio, sea para mayorías o minorías, pero la intervención no puede ser la misma por parte de la Justicia o del Inadi.
No importa tanto la intención del que dice las palabras sino el umbral de las personas o el colectivo que es discriminado: estamos intentando sensibilizar y hacer docencia sobre una serie de temas con manuales y talleres. A las personas que viven con VIH primero se las llamó “sidosas” y después “portadores de SIDA”, pero las personas rechazan estas denominaciones por discriminatorias. Hay que escuchar al colectivo que a través de su trabajo y reflexión ha llegado a la denominación “personas que viven con VIH” considerando a todas las demás denominaciones discriminatorias. Los pueblos originarios se autodefinen como “pueblos o naciones originarias”, y desaprueban la palabra “indígena” porque entienden que refiere a “indigente”, y rechazan también los términos “primitivos” o “indios”. Algo puede ser dicho por error o ignorancia en algunos contextos, pero hay frases que no dan lugar a pensar que su utilización no sea descalificante y prejuiciosa. Cuando decís “dale mogólica”, negro villero o son bolitas muchas veces se aplica a personas que textualmente no lo son pero se lo utiliza como un insulto.
En muchos casos es imprescindible, necesario, conveniente el reemplazo de un término por otro cuando los colectivos han manifestado que no les da lo mismo. Las palabras también construyen imaginarios: no es lo mismo “sidoso” o “portador de SIDA” que “persona que vive con VIH”. Apuntamos a que se dejen de utilizar palabras que están ya descartadas por los propios colectivos y que se hable con corrección en relación a lios avances teóricos de los distintos colectivos, esa es una campaña educativa que tiene que ver con los usos del lenguaje en la escuela, en los medios de comunicación, en los avisos clasificados, etc. Estamos por otro lado promoviendo el uso de lenguaje de género no discriminatorio en la legislación. Hay una utilización de términos despectivamente discriminatorios aplicados a personas que no pertenecen a ese colectivo que genera y reproduce estos estereotipos, en la cancha de fútbol, como insulto cotidiano, y también estamos intentando combatir… de la misma manera que los chicos dejaron de tirar basura al piso o combaten a los padres que fuman, nosotros suponemos que podemos apuntar también a que tengan una conducta no discriminatoria, tienen que tomar conciencia de que hay un colectivo afectado por esta manera de hablar que no es necesariamente el compañero.
Estamos llamando el 26 de agosto a una reunión a todas las empresas de recursos humanos y las secciones de clasificados de los diarios y las webs de búsquedas laborales apuntando a la eliminación de los avisos clasificados de términos descriptivos que no tienen que ver con la idoneidad o la experiencia para la posición laboral que se solicita. Ahí también hay una serie de requerimientos que para ellos son descriptivos pero que claramente son limitativos del acceso al empleo. Estamos pidiendo que se redacten con perspectivas de género, que no tengan topes de edad, que no hagan una descripción física de las personas: lo único que se puede hacer en un aviso es la descripción del puesto de trabajo y la descripción de las capacidades, idoneidades y perfiles laborales requeridos, pero no exigir fotos.
Nosotros no queremos que alguien nos diga “el Inadi se ocupa de las palabras y no de los hechos reales”,  es un debate en paralelo.
Las palabras tienen poder en la construcción de imaginarios y de prácticas, no son neutras. Lo que elInadi está haciendo con esta licencia de decir “las palabras discriminan” es decir que estas palabras construyen o reproducen en el lenguaje cotidiano los estereotipos que después degeneran en situaciones de violencia o de actos discriminatorios concretos

Grillo

El signo siempre comporta una distinción, ese es su valor, la posibilidad de oponerse a otro signo dentro de un sistema. De ahí sale la potencia del signo. Hay que ver dónde está uno en relación con el signo. Un sujeto marca un signo.
Lo que habría que analizar son los presupuestos y los implícitos, no de palabras sueltas, sino de palabras puestas en encadenamientos. Estalla la Embajada de Israel y se habla de “víctimas inocentes”: la oposición y la diferencia están implícitos ahí, porque si hay inocentes hay culpables, y eso me parece más temible.
Se queda en el epifenómeno. Todos coincidimos con que eso está mal, son términos despectivos y peyorativos, pero no se juega sólo ahí. Hay enclaves menos advertidos y más naturalizados que están tramitando prejuicios en otro nivel, uno se queda en la superficie de “no decir bolita” pero por atrás hay un estereotipo que sigue siendo discriminatorio.
Si se eliminan los términos está más limpito todo, pero algo se va a poner en ese lugar. A veces se tramita desde lo sintáctico: ‘hubo una manifestación de Quebracho pero no hubo incidentes’ da por supuesto que cada vez que hay una marcha hay incidentes, o algo que señala Hugo Muleiro en Palabra por palabra, que cada vez que se usa la palabra ‘menor’ en los medios es para referirse a niños o adolescentes marginales que tienen que ver con la Justicia, nadie diría menor para referirse a los niños que van al zoológico o al Planetario. O cuando se dice ‘en un tiroteo murió por error una mujer que estaba en la calle’, ¿quiere decir que matar a ciertas personas es acertado? Es la perspectiva del asesino. Hay que estar atento sobre esas expresiones, en principio uno no pensaría que ahí hay discriminación y está. Va más allá de las palabras, depende de qué estás pensando cuando decís eso.
La discriminación es constitutiva del lenguaje, si no hubiera discriminación no se podrían decir cosas.
Si el gobierno de Estados Unidos dice que hubo ‘fuego amigo’, en ese eufemismo hay algo que no se quiere decir. Hay formas atenuadas de referirse al otro que son visiones del otro como alguien que hay que cuidar y que son visiones del otro como alguien a quien hay que proteger especialmente o cuidar, y el otro no quiere ser tratado como si fuera un infradotado. Hay que ver de todas maneras cómo ese sujeto quiere ser reconocido.
La palabra en relación con qué otras palabras está? No usemos palabras despectivas, son normas de urbanidad lingüística, pero el prejuicio está anidando en otro lugar: el lenguaje es una manifestación, pero la sola palabra despectiva no está tramitando eso, hay otras construcciones donde eso está.
Uno puede decir ‘negro’ y hablar de Usain Bolt, entonces los negros son fibrosos, son rápidos. La palabra ‘negro’ en determinados contextos puede ser bárbara, pero en una frase como ‘no es negro pero es negro de alma’ se trata de otra cosa. Se trata de qué palabra es, en relación con qué otras palabras la ponés y quién la está usando para designar a qué otro.
“Los griegos decían ‘necrópolis’, la ciudad de los muertos. Después dijeron ‘cementerio’, que es dormitorio, que es un eufemismo por morir es como dormir. Hoy en día tenemos la botánica, y entonces son todos jardines o parques. En algún punto dejamos de saber que cementerio quiere decir dormitorio, para nosotros es el lugar donde están los muertos, y entonces nos corremos al parque. Siempre va a pasar eso: la lengua se mueve, y en el punto en el que no queremos escuchar algo aparece el nuevo eufemismo.”
“Las metáforas de la vida cotidiana,” de Lakof y Johnson. Hay muchas metáforas que nos sirven para relacionarnos con la realidad y con las cosas, y algunas de esas metáforas son prejuiciosas y son ofensivas para ciertos grupos y pueden ser discriminadoras y hay que trabajarlas también. Por ejemplo, el negro y el blanco: eso es constitutivo de las culturas, son metáforas muy arraigadas, cuando algo está oscuro es negro y uno no ve, y hay muchas otras situaciones en las que se usa y parece que esté cargado. Pero no se puede expurgar todo. Hay valores que comportan la claridad y la luz (la luz es vida, es calor) y la oscuridad es lo contrario, pero
En los discursos públicos es necesario cuidarse.
Los manuales periodísticos fuera de la Argentina tienen advertencias sobre racismo o sexismo. Los manuales están para llamar la atención sobre ciertos usos, pero lo que hay que revisar son las prácticas que están detrás.
Las palabras discriminan casi por naturaleza: están para poner matiz, para juzgar, para distinguir. Pero yo puedo usar la palabra como un arma arrojadiza o para tender un puente.
“Los alemanes son perfectos para la organización: mirá qué bien les salió Treblinka”. Uno puede ver también el revés de la trama.
El estereotipo en un punto sirve para vincularse la realidad: uno no puede tener un vínculo con la realidad no mediado por lenguaje. Hay estereotipos que son productivos, que nos sirven para entender rápido una situación. El prejuicio es una manera de relacionarse con lo desconocido, y eso nos viene a veces de las historias que nos cuentan de chicos, de los cuentos de hadas, estereotipos como el zorro o el lobo. Están para enseñarles cosas a los chicos, y los chicos aprenden a vincularse con la realidad de cierto modo. No se puede erradicar los prejuicios, pero se puede ver qué prejuicios son perniciosos o siniestros y trabajarlos en el aula – si los chicos vuelven a sus casas y la familia es prejuiciosa, no hay mucho que se pueda hacer al respecto.
Cuanta más responsabilidad, o más visibilidad, tenga la persona, más cargo hay que hacerse de lo que hay detrás de la palabra.
Embajadora no quería decir ‘mujer que está a cargo de una embajada’ sino ‘esposa del embajador’, ‘gobernanta’ no es lo mismo que ‘gobernante’, el femenino muchas veces tiene que ver con tareas hogareñas o cargos menores mientras que el masculino tiene que ver con la cosa pública. Pero si queremos hablar de verdad ataquemos el problema de fondo y generemos oportunidades iguales

3.4.11

Where the streets actually have no name

U2’s 360° Tour in La Plata will blow you away – if you only get to hear it right


You may have seen videos and photos of The Claw, the centrepiece of U2’s  360° tour, and yet they do not prepare you for standing in the presence of the first wave of the Martian invasion. It is massive. I mean, truly massive, the legs spanning the width of a soccer pitch, its spire as tall as the arena that houses it. And La Plata’s Estadio Único is the perfect landing site – with or without U2, the rising curves and overarching canopy already give the place an outlandish feel, like it too has been brought from another planet.
And the band harps on the alien theme with its classic irony: the band walks on stage on top of David Bowie’s Space Oddity and walks out to the chorus of Elton John’s Rocket Man, and there are videos in between sets with cartoonish spaceships. The same irony that created The Claw: if you cannot hide the rig that is going to hold the lights and sound gear on top of a circular stage, hide it in plain sight by shoving it in the faces of the audience – make it so massive that it becomes the identity of the tour.
But the true cosmic event is the way in which Bono & co. take half a century of arena rock evolution, turn it on its head, run it through a blender and then amp it up to a factor of one million. It is the most spectacular rock show on Earth – a scripted, choreographed and utterly designed event in which every effect, movement, visual, prop and sound has been engineered for maximum effect. The experience is truly all around you: lights flood the stage in impossible configurations from all corners of the Claw, but they also project on the audience, turning the field into a sea of coloured heads and arms, the seats into giant screens for a light show that makes the experience unique.
U2 plays an arena the way Jimi Hendrix played a Stratocaster, and it sets them in a category of their own. David Bowie brought cabaret onto the stage, but he never really took it all the way. Peter Gabriel trademarked the concept show, but he leaves all the fun and concept on the stage. The Rolling Stones pump you harder, but they plant a bomb in front of you and let it explode. You may have seen better bands, more inspired musicians, more energetic shows, momentous tours that make the history books of rock music, but you will not live through something as engaging and engorging as this.
And they’ve been working on it for 20 years: Rattle & Hum (1987) chronicles the Joshua Tree tour, when U2 peaked their potential as a rock quartet and parted ways with the classic rock band. Four years later they greeted a new decade with a new album (Achtung Baby), a new self (a postmodern multimedia sensory overload) and a new tour to make it all happen (ZooTV). Since then, they have one-upped themselves on each world outing, always pushing the envelope one inch further, testing the borders, turning utopias into goldmines, repeating the music (the setlist goes all the way back to their first albums, with songs like Gloria, New Year’s Day, Sunday Bloody Sunday or I Will Follow) but never the ride – and, like the theme song to TV series United States of Tara goes, “I know we’ll be just fine if we learn to love the ride.”

A four-stroke engine. But in the middle of the multimedia explosion, just beneath the giant round TV screen that turns their faces into humongous icons, are four Irish guys (The Edge was actually born in England, but who’s counting), just flesh and blood singing, strumming and banging on metal and wood through a few truckloads of electronics. If they get to be blown into titans it must be because they have something titanic in the first place.
And they do. They have the songs, in the first place: while their albums may be uneven and sometimes patchy, U2 has enough solid gold songs to fill a lot more than the 160 minutes they play on this tour. Indeed, they could play many shows in many different textures, making them sound like different bands: the rockers, the lovers, the ravers, the melancholy gazers, the pick-you-ups, the mellow-you-downs. Deciding what to play, with a band like them, means more than anything making hard choices about what not to play.
Their setlist last Wednesday kicked off with a combo blow to the head: Even Better than the Real Thing, I Will Follow, Get On Your Boots, Magnificent and Misterious Ways light a mighty fuse that explodes in Elevation segueing into Until the End of the World. Then they brought it down with I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, picket it up two songs later with Beautiful Day, only to cool it with In a Little While. City of Blinding LightsVertigo, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Where The Streets Have No Name (sung in La Plata, a city whose streets actually don’t) got you jumping and pumping fists; One, Miss Sarajevo and With or Without You mellowed the affair, and so the rollercoaster went.
But the songs are propelled by a four-stroke engine as tight and powerful as an F1 racer. Bono is the ultimate frontman, an effective singer that excels at coming across to 58,000 people at once, lifting and soothing and wowing them at will, a presence bigger than the Claw and louder than the blaring sound. The Edge is the most underestimated of the guitarists that redefined the role of the guitar in rock music: while not a virtuoso, his echoes and delays and infinite effects squeeze the six strings for sounds they never thought they had in them, and the misterious way in which he weaves from rhythm to lead to noise to melody justifies Bono describing him on stage as “a man who is everywhere at the same time, and always somewhere interesting.¨ Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums are the unsung heroes providing the rock-solid foundation for the fanfare to stand on. Proof? Before the band walked on stage a crew member started playing a few bass lines from the songs to test the sound, and that was enough to turn  the crowd on, as recognizable as the tunes themselves, and the same could be said of Mullen’s beats.
the 180° tour. And yet, there was an Achilles heel to Wednesday’s show. A pretty big one, if you ask me.
The tour is named 360°, but not all degrees were created equal inside the Estadio Único. The Claw stands not at the centre of the pitch but at one of its ends, which creates the illusion of a traditional set with an open backstage more than a perfect circle – and the band’s efforts to walk around the outer ring that surrounded the inner circle of the stage still did not alter the fact that, for a considerable amount of time, the backbenchers had a view of Bono’s bum.
That could be spun into a defining feature: the fun of  360° is that you get to choose from many concert experiences, either a conventional one (augmented by the massive spaceship in front of you) on the pitch, or a truly upclose ride in the inner circle (where the band hovers over and around you on rotating bridges), or a panoramic one on the sides of the stadium. Choose your poison, as they go.
But for any of that to work, everyone must get decent sound. And last Wednesday, for a considerable chunk of the stadium, the sound quality was, to use a technical term, crap. Not Phil Spector’s wall of sound, but a ball of sound – a gooey, sticky, fuzzy ball. While the best show on Earth rolled in front of your eyes, where I sat (front right of the stage, on the sides, if you want to know) it felt like I was listening to it through a cheap radio blaring out.
The Claw booms mightily from towers of speakers on all four sides, but somehow the engineers had not compensated for the compounded echo of the three sides standing dangerously close to the sonic death trap of the stands and ceiling bouncing back the music, and the tsunami of waves resulted in the aforementioned ball. Bad for the distinct, precise, delicate balance of U2, but absolutely deathly for the power rock of supporting act Muse, which got to my ears as loud distorted gravel where voice equalled guitar equalled whatever else. Literally, the singer was talking between songs and I couldn’t make out the words.
Friends in front of the stage reported to bad sound but not as bad as what I got, while out photographer standing at the inner circle says it sounded just fine. Images on TV report that the mixing board heard a choir of rock angels, and I am looking forward to a TV broadcast to see what sound experience the lads had in mind as they were playing.
Fellow members of the press told me that the shows in Santiago de Chile sounded absolutely perfect, and the sound engineers (if they want to keep their job, at least) will no doubt get the sliders and knobs tuned just right for tomorrow and Sunday. I just hope they had got them right on Wednesday’s sound check.
But that minor distraction did bring to mind a hazard of  U2 on stage: in a show that pushes the envelope so much, that is so minutely architectured, it only takes the slightest distraction from the thrill of the ride (like a grating roar of pebbles à la Matthew Arnold in your ears in my case) to highlight the edge of over-the-top just a hair’s width away. But the nyou get back on the train and have the ride of your life.
Buenos Aires Herald, 31/3/2011

23.2.11

A Modest Proposal Revisited: Teaching English in the Real World

En un comentario al post anterior, alguien me pedía el texto de un artículo mío de hace ya varios años. Aquí está. 

EFL ‘Howl’

I have seen the best teachers of my generation lying on a classroom floor, their lessons bleeding, their mind faltering, their methodology scattered over the desks where thirty-odd unmotivated students chatter, work on their homework for other subjects and make plans for the next weekend. I have seen them try "affective learning" and humanistic activities with a group of teenagers who wanted nothing out of the subject but a passing mark, and who interpreted their "heart-to-heart" approach as a sign of lack of control over the classroom and started a full-scale riot. I have seen them struggling to get a grip on themselves while repeating to themselves the mantra “misbehaviour is only a symptom of lack of motivation and communication”, their self esteem oozing out of their pores every time the phrase is uttered. I have seen them poring over books with titles like "Get the best out of your students through yoga exercises and subconscious tapping", "A multicultural approach to the teaching of language skills" and "Drama, poetry, dancing, chanting and prancing in the language classroom". I have seen them, and myself, try all this in a state secondary school where the students are unmotivated, the tape recorder does not work, a VCR is a utopia, discipline is non-existent, teaching of other subjects is almost Victorian (Dickensian, I should say, thinking of "Hard Times" and Mrs Wopsle in "Great Expectations") and the pay is short of a pittance. I have seen them try and fail, only to try again in the following lesson. I have seen their best intentions crumble as their discouragement rises. I have seen their despair, their frustration, their relentless effort leading nowhere.
I have seen this, and I have said to myself “somewhere along the line, something has gone wrong”. Something must be done to help real teachers in real classrooms. Something to avoid their turning to the “tried and tested recipes” other teachers resort to - threaten students with low grades or extra homework, treat them as juvenile delinquents, create an atmosphere of terror through displays of power, use psychological (and even in some cases physical) violence. Something to bridge the gap between belief and practice. Something to allow teachers to do their best teaching.

Howling down

My poor imitation of Allen Ginsberg aside, a quick browse through a professional library will show that most books were written by teachers who work in small schools with highly motivated students who travel to England for the sole reason of attending a language course. These teachers (who usually work at only one place with reasonable timetables and an equally reasonable salary) have resources that overworked and underpaid teachers in the “real world” envision only in dreams: computers, libraries, administrative staff, a group of colleagues in the same circumstances willing to work as a team, opportunities (very often paid) for reflection and professional development and, most of all, time. By the same token, those teachers will rarely face a class of more than 12 students, and if they do, those students will be strongly motivated. What is more, their students will be doing nothing but learning English: there will be no other subjects in the curriculum, few other concerns in their minds.
Needless to say, the predominant teaching reality in the rest of the teaching world is far from what has been described in the previous paragraph, if not the opposite. Teachers have to face large classes of students who have as little as three weekly periods of language teaching squeezed in between ten other subjects. Classes in which, in many cases, discipline and motivation are foreign notions. Classes which take as much as five minutes to quiet down and as little as five seconds to return to a state of chaos. Classes in which students will be more interested in doing a last-minute review for their coming Mathematics test than in reading an article about their favourite rock band or preparing a poster describing their neighbourhood- let alone listening to a taped radio programme about the history of the Volkswagen Beetle. Yet the teacher, overworked and underpaid as s/he is, spends Saturday mornings (and a substantial amount of his/her meagre salary and free time) at seminars by or about what the teachers mentioned in the previous paragraph have produced. Attending such seminars, or simply perusing the literature on the same subject, may at times approach an exercise in utopian visualisation, and at best feels like driving a Ferrari in a shanty town: the streets are much rougher than those the car was designed for, and the vehicle is likely to be vandalised the minute it gets out of the garage. It just does not work. Not because there is something inherently wrong with the ideas, but because they have emerged from a different teaching reality.

A modest proposal

Based on what I said before, I strongly believe it is essential to select a corpus of “Real World methodology", a selection of material that supports those teaching in schools where conditions are far from adequate (i. e., anyone working in public and some sectors of private education, be it in Argentina, Brazil, the UK or Japan), material bringing real help for real situations in real classrooms. Material which, rather than reinvent psychology, addresses classroom situations. Material written by people with chalk-white (or marker-black) fingers, people who have been there, done that and reflected on it.
Participating on Internet discussion lists brought my attention to the fact that far-from-ideal teaching conditions are not exclusive to Latin America, as I had first thought, but seem to be the reality of schools all over the world. This makes the proposal, if anything, more urgent. It also highlights the extent to which teachers discredit themselves by submitting to the dictums of academia: home-grown ideas, useful and valuable as they may be, seem to lose all value when opposed to the flashy, five-syllabled, chart-and-graphed, pseudo-scientific, highly abstract writings of the guru-like “credited authorities in ELT”.
Teacher trainers seem especially prone to being seduced by the glamorous gurus. Most students leaving teacher training colleges these days (i. e., the future professionals) seem to be under the impression that methodology and teaching are divorced. They cannot be blamed for thinking so if they have devoted more class time to the discussion of suggestopaedia and the silent way than to class management and control. They cannot be blamed if they have been trained in using rather than creating and authoring material. And they cannot be blamed, either, for turning their backs on public education in search of an environment in which they find better working conditions, if they have not been prepared (or encouraged) to deal with the challenges that public education involves.
Reversing this situation, however, is not half as hard as it sounds. The tools are readily available- a few books, some minds, some will to change. It may involve as little as selecting a collection of articles and titles and passing it on to other colleagues so that the list grows with the recommendations of as many teachers as possible. It may mean adapting some theories or approaches to our reality and making these variations known to other teachers. It may mean producing some material and even some theory, or summarising and processing existing theory. It may mean getting involved in Action Research and professional exchanges. What it does not mean is providing teachers with a collection of “recipes”. Nothing could be further from my thoughts. There is nothing more practical than a sound theory; there is nothing as useless as a bunch of recipes. I propose a grassroots, hands-on approach which, far from spoonfeeding teachers or preaching on what can and cannot be done in a classroom, provides teachers with tools for reflecting on their teaching reality. I am drawing attention to the need for more Action Research and creative work, and for the sharing of this work among as large a group of teachers as possible. If anything, I am asking teachers to assume their role as professionals of language teaching rather than VCR technicians who can fix and adapt what other people designed but cannot build an operating model all for themselves.

So far... (The Road Ahead)

Teachers rarely suggest each other things they wouldn’t try themselves, yet when one reads the latest methodology books the reaction is often “That would never work”, “I would never do something like that” or (perhaps the most discouraging of all) “That would be great but I have not got the time and/or resources”. The place where most of the change I am envisioning will take place is the staff room, over a cup of coffee. A few teachers with a few minutes in between lessons exchange information which I have found to be more valuable and sensible than most things books teach: “I have done that exercise, but I have changed...”, “You may try this technique I have found somewhere and which has worked well with my students”, “Is anyone interested in this article/video segment/activity I found...?”, “In my experience, that does not work because...”, “That’s a good idea; however, I would also...”. Given the right staff and the right attitude, much will come out of very little. But, most important of all, what other teachers will suggest will always come from experience, and not from the latest theory or as a way of supporting the point an author is making.
Other changes will have to take place where the seed becomes a bud: at teacher training courses. I will be so bold as to mention my own experience. A few months ago I was offered a teaching position at a teacher training college. Its title, “Visual Aids and Multimedia in ELT”, was challenging, and a number of decisions had to be made. At one end lied a semiology-based course on media studies with glimpses of language acquisition theory, a bit of neuro linguistic programming and the like. At the other end, the ever-present temptation of reviewing published material, handing out a bunch of recipes showing “how I go about it” and then “try to do the same in your classroom, thank you very much, goodbye”. Neither option would have been satisfactory: the first would have filled the students with useless data and half-baked ideas that would not have taken them one step closer to becoming better teachers; the latter would have meant transmitting tips and recipes, but would leave them in the lurch when push came to shove and they had to prepare their own lessons. The most realistic, practical and committed solution (at least the one I could come up with) was basing the course on a relative lack of theory and an absence of recipes, and as much common sense and creativity as thirty trainees (all of them working as teachers already) could muster. I also made a point of not doing anything in class that trainees would not be able to do in a real teaching environment, with real students and real timing. So far, this has meant asking them to prepare activities and account for them (building their own theory as they do so), sharing their ideas, criticising each other’s work, as well as adding and contributing to it. Some months (plus a few strikes and bank holidays) after the beginning of our weekly lessons, I have found this approach to go a long way, with new and exciting ideas being produced almost every meeting (some of them similar to the ones found in the literature on the subject, others which to the best of my knowledge are new) and, most important of all, with the students developing a critical, hands-on attitude rather than good reading habits.
These are just two ideas in the direction of what I believe would be a positive change. Time, trial and error will tell if these are the right steps or not. Whatever the path chosen, however, it is clear that something must be done to bridge the gap between the theory we look up to and the reality we go through. Otherwise, all the things which are available to more privileged students (in schools of English, in private lessons, taking ESP courses in their offices) will never be available to those who cannot afford to pay extra. Otherwise, we will be failing in our mission as teachers, which is to bring the best of our knowledge to all of our students.